Bordeaux Is Pulling Out Its Vines

Bordeaux is pulling out its vines. Not a few tired rows here and there, but thousands of hectares, paid for by the French government.

I spent three weeks there this vintage, working harvest at Château Puynard, Château Magdeleine Bouhou and Soul Beni in Saint-Émilion. Long days, sticky hands, the cellar humming from early morning until well after dark. It was everything I love about harvest.

But there was another conversation running underneath all of it. Over lunch, in the cellar, at the end of the day with a glass in hand. Bordeaux is in crisis, and everyone knew it.

What I saw from the road

I was also training for the Champagne half marathon, so most mornings before work I'd head out running the back roads through the vineyards. That's when I saw it for myself.

Vineyards left to go wild. Rows no one had touched in a season or more, overgrown and tangled, the canes running everywhere. And then whole paddocks stripped back to bare dirt, where vines had stood not long ago.

I'd spend my days inside the cellar, watching the care that goes into every single bottle, then run past fields where that care had simply stopped. Same region. Same soil. Two completely different stories.

What's happening

The reason is simple. There's too much wine in Bordeaux and not enough people buying it.

So the French government is paying growers to rip their vines out. Around €4,000 a hectare, rising to as much as €10,000 in the hardest-hit areas, including parts of the Right Bank where I was working. The plan is to clear roughly 9,500 hectares in the Gironde, and once the vines are gone, no replanting is allowed for years.

It isn't the first attempt to fix the surplus either. Before the vine pull, there were schemes paying to distil excess wine into industrial alcohol. Wine that someone grew, picked and made with care, turned into something that will never see a glass.

The people behind the numbers

Some call it a dignified exit. For a few growers it is a lifeline, a way out from under debt and unsold stock.

For a lot of families though, it's the end of something built over generations, settled for a few thousand euros a hectare. I'm not sure there's anything dignified about watching your grandfather's vines come out of the ground.

That's the side of Bordeaux nobody puts on a postcard. The glossy version, the grand châteaux and the eye-watering prices, is only the thin top layer. Underneath is a region full of small growers who can't sell what they make, sitting on wine nobody is buying, making decisions no one should have to make.

This isn't just a Bordeaux problem

It would be easy to read this as one famous region getting it wrong. It isn't. It's a wine problem, and it's coming for every region that relies on people choosing to sit down and open a bottle. New Zealand included.

People are drinking less, and drinking differently. There's a lot of noise around alcohol right now, and wine has been swept up in it, turned into something to cut back on and feel guilty about. Somewhere along the way we've lost sight of what wine is for, bringing people together and giving them a reason to sit down and talk. That's a whole conversation of its own, and one I'll come back to soon.

So here's the question I keep coming back to. If the care, the skill and the generations of knowledge are all still there, and the wine in the glass is still good, what happens when people stop showing up for it?

Once they're gone

I came home from Bordeaux with full memories of vintage and the people I worked alongside. I also came home with the picture of those bare paddocks, and it hasn't left me.

Wine is people. It always has been. Every bottle carries someone's harvest, someone's decisions and years of patience. And right now, a lot of those people in Bordeaux are hurting.

Because once those vines come out, they don't come back.